The New YorkerModify

In Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “The History of Sound,” two young men at the New England Conservatory of Music meet in a bar, when one of them (Josh O’Connor) plays a folk song the other (Paul Mescal) instantly recognizes. The two fall into bed, and then love, almost at once—but World War I soon intervenes, sending one to the front and the other back to the countryside where he was born. Queer love and romance are not new themes for Hermanus, whose other projects include “Mary & George” (in which Julianne Moore plays a countess who uses her son’s beauty to seduce King James I). Not long ago, he joined us to talk about a few novels of same-sex desire that have inspired him. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

When I started thinking about the books I wanted to talk about, I was struck by the fact that there’s the story of each book, but there’s also the story of the authors and their relationships to the books. The ones I chose are all interesting to me because of the intention behind them. These are all by queer writers who hid their sexuality sometimes.

I read “Death in Venice” when I was in my twenties, living in Paris—I had the very Parisian experience of sitting in a café reading it—and it loosely inspired my second film, which is about a sexually repressed middle-aged character. I called my film “Beauty” because that is the commodity that is most treasured in the book. I was fuelled by the book, but I was almost upset by it, too, because I interpreted it as a very misguided, varnished book about lust. It’s a case where the author is speaking in a language that he finds agreeable in order to express something inside of him. It’s hidden, but it’s also not hidden. It’s coding desire into beauty, to make that desire acceptable in some way.

Maurice

by E. M. Forster

The Merchant Ivory adaptation of “Maurice” was the first queer film I ever watched. I did it sort of illegally—I was too young, it was kind of titillating to watch it in secret—and I read the book only after I saw the movie. I read it again recently because I was fascinated by the fact that it was published without the author’s knowledge—I’d never realized that Forster had died before the book could come out. It fascinates me that the author has no idea that we, the public, have access to this novel.

The story first follows two men, Maurice and Clive, who meet at Cambridge and fall in love. Although Maurice is cautious about it, they step into a relationship. But, because they are of marrying age, the threats on their bachelorhood become a pressure between them, and eventually Clive succumbs to those pressures, and the relationship ends. Later, Maurice—who is more upper class—has a relationship with a man who comes from a background very different from his, and who is working on the grounds of Clive’s estate. The book traverses the story of these relationships elegantly. And Forster’s attitude toward Maurice is also very interesting—he describes him as someone who’s handsome but not necessarily the smartest or the most deserving of things. I like that he questions the main character in this way.

The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith first published this book under a pseudonym, for fear of being associated with it. That is another, rather blunt manifestation of the fear of authorship that each of these books expresses, in a way—Forster didn’t want to publish his novel, and Mann kind of veils the true content of what he’s interested in.

In “The Price of Salt,” a housewife falls in love with a shopgirl. The novel really shows the texture of their life. Ultimately, the drama of the book turns on whether the housewife’s love for her child—who could be taken away from her in those days, if during divorce proceedings the court learned that she was gay—is more important than the love she has in her relationship. The characters are beautifully drawn. I always love Highsmith, but one thing that stands out in this case is that these characters are nice. You like them. And that’s not usually the case with her.

Assassins and would-be assassins have become a sickeningly common feature of our polarized political landscape, and so have our rituals in the aftermath of the assailants’ heinous acts. First come the shock and the bipartisan expressions of regret. Then, almost as instantly, come the debates: Whose side was he on? Just as often as not, the clues come from fragments of the shooter’s life on the internet. Deciphering social-media messages, private chat-room records, and Google-search histories, we hunt for ideological bread crumbs.

Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of the right-wing activist and MAGA ally Charlie Kirk, used bullets that he had engraved with phrases that revealed less about his political affiliations than his fluency in deep internet culture. One bullet said “Hey fascist! Catch!,” then included a code for dropping a bomb in the video game Helldivers 2. Another said “If you Read / This, You Are / GAY / lmao,” and a third contained an emoticon-laced message drawn from furry subculture. (The symbol is not perverse because of its origins; it’s perverse because of how gleefully and literally it was weaponized, not unlike when Nikki Haley wrote “Finish them” on Israeli artillery destined for Gaza.) Spencer Cox, the Republican Governor of Utah, has said that Robinson subscribed to a “Leftist ideology.” According to court documents released on Tuesday, Robinson’s mother told investigators that he had moved to the left politically in the past year, becoming more “pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” He had also begun to date his roommate, who, in his mother’s description, was male at birth and was transitioning. Text-message exchanges quoted in the documents show Robinson telling his roommate that he had killed Kirk because he’d “had enough of his hatred.” Still, it is unclear how Robinson made the leap from disliking Kirk’s views to deciding to murder him—he wrote, chillingly, that he’d been planning the shooting for only “a bit over a week”—and the messages that Robinson left behind remain a muddle. The phrase “Bella Ciao,” engraved on one bullet, is both the title of a famous antifascist anthem and a phrase that crops up in video games. Some have pointed out that the song also appeared on a Spotify playlist associated with Groypers, a group of far-right, white-nationalist, meme-steeped internet denizens led by Nick Fuentes, who frequently attacked Kirk for not being extreme enough. In isolation, the references are vague enough to be interpreted every which way.

According to an interview that Robinson’s grandmother gave to the Daily Mail, he grew up in a conservative family that staunchly supported Trump. He attended just one semester of college before dropping out. He was registered to vote in Utah but was unaffiliated with a party and did not vote in the 2024 Presidential election. Instead, he seems to have spent time in the corners of the internet where young men can become radicalized toward violence. Like Payton Gendron, who committed a mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in 2022, Robinson left a trail of self-implicating messages on the chat-room app Discord. In one chat, he reportedly played dumb about Kirk’s murder, joking about how the suspect was his “doppelganger.” In another chat, though, he confessed to shooting Kirk, saying, “It was me,” just before going with his family to turn himself in to the police.

Whatever radicalization Robinson may have undergone online, people in his offline life seem to have failed to fully understand what was happening to him. Only he knew what ideas he was steeping himself in, and the stubborn opacity of his motivations adds to our collective despair in this moment: if, as one TikTok commentator put it, Kirk’s assassination was in some sense a “shitpost”—a nihilistic in-joke translated horribly into real-world action—then an already senseless act becomes an utterly meaningless one. Memes are incoherent by nature; it’s useless to try to make them mean more than they do. That police are now talking about furries in public is Robinson’s gruesome joke, carried out for the benefit of the online audience that he was, on some level, performing for. (In the text exchange quoted in the court documents, he writes, “The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new I might have a stroke.”) Robinson is not alone in this self-referentiality and crackpot mythologizing; the alleged perpetrator of a shooting at a Colorado high school posted TikToks in which he’d copied the poses of previous shooters and showed off a T-shirt that referenced the Columbine mass shooting, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Shootings have effectively become their own memes, with their own viral tropes and signifiers. No matter what political ideas Robinson may have harbored, he might ultimately be best understood as a participant in that warped online culture.

On the surface, Charlie Kirk had a very different, more traditional path to online notoriety. He made his first appearance on a Fox channel when he was seventeen years old. He rose to fame through conservative media and built his youth organization, Turning Point USA, into a thriving tool of political influence with its own PAC. Kirk had the ear of the Trump Administration and by all accounts helped to staff its ranks. Ezra Klein made the case, in a recent column, that Kirk was practicing politics the “right way,” by staging debates in which he proselytized his brand of conservatism, particularly on tours of universities. Yet Kirk leveraged a version of the same toxic online dynamics and algorithmic-attention sinkholes that can ensnare people like Robinson. He launched a regular digital broadcast, the Charlie Kirk Show, in 2019, and in 2022 created a TikTok account that gained millions of followers, stocked with clips from his show and smartphone-recorded riffs. He created a universe of content that his adherents could live within, complete with its own ideological memes. The kind of free speech and lively discourse that Kirk espoused involved spreading hateful conspiracy theories and misinformation. He shared (and later deleted) inflated human-trafficking arrest numbers plucked from 8chan, supported Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, told Taylor Swift to “submit to your husband,” and targeted prominent Black women while stoking “great replacement” fears. Kirk was not simply practicing democratic politics; he was a slick and professionalized counterpart to the online troll, someone who understood that reckless lies promulgated through viral sound bites and incendiary podcast monologues repeated ad nauseum can shape today’s public opinion, whether on college campuses or in the halls of the White House.

Now, Kirk’s assassination—caught on video, ubiquitous in our online feeds—has turbocharged the impact of his content machine. On Monday, Vice-President J. D. Vance filled in as a guest host of Kirk’s online show, broadcasting from the White House. Vance used the platform to claim, without evidence, that “people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.” The Trump Administration has promised to crack down on leftist “terrorist networks,” using Kirk’s death as further justification for the unchecked targeting and silencing of its perceived enemies. A growing number of people, including a Washington Post opinion columnist and professors at Clemson University, have already been fired for publicly criticizing Kirk. Meanwhile, Kirk’s social-media accounts have posthumously gained millions of followers. On X, Senator Ted Cruz posted the kind of imagery that has aptly been labelled “slopaganda”: A.I.-generated images of Jesus embracing Kirk and of Kirk with the late Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska, who was recently stabbed to death on a train in North Carolina. The horror of Kirk’s murder will serve the demands of the content mill, stoking more outraged engagement among his preëxisting fan base. As with the epidemic of gun violence, the self-perpetuating cycle of online radicalization continues unbroken, with harrowing consequences for all sides of the political spectrum. ♦

“I was losing my mind,” the chef and writer Samin Nosrat said. We were sitting in the living room of her small house in Oakland, and she was describing a period in her life, just after the arrival of COVID vaccines, when she was sunk in a depression and floundering in her attempts to write the follow-up to her 2017 cooking guide, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” That book was a phenomenon whose promise to teach readers the four “elements of good cooking”—thus liberating them from the tyranny of recipes—proved irresistible. It earned Nosrat a James Beard Award, spawned a Netflix series, and sold 1.4 million copies. In 2019, Nosrat sold a proposal for an ambitious sequel called “What to Cook,” which would help readers decide on a dish based on four constraints: time, resources, preferences, and ingredients. But the concept refused to cohere. After two years, she said, “I was, like, ‘Take the money back.’ ”

One of her agents suggested that she just write, you know, a cookbook, with recipes. At first, Nosrat resisted. Though “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” includes recipes, it also sniffs at them. For beginning cooks, Nosrat writes, “recipes can be necessary and comforting, like training wheels.” She stresses that their ultimate goal should be to remove those training wheels: to “improvise, and judge what good food looks like on your own terms.”

Nosrat distrusts recipes, but she’s very good at devising them. She might be responsible for more canonical dishes than any other writer in the past decade. The list of her hits reads like the Billboard Top Ten: her buttermilk roast chicken, her garlicky green beans, her tahdig, her focaccia. Just the other day, a friend was trying to figure out how to cook some chicken thighs, and I advised her to try Nosrat’s conveyor-belt chicken. As has been the case every one of the dozens of times I’ve cooked it, it worked perfectly.

Nosrat tried to follow her agent’s advice, but she felt like a fraud. “There was nothing that made me excited to cook,” she recalled. “I was just trying to figure out, like, What is the point? Who cares?”

One morning, Nosrat was in the middle of a misbegotten experiment—attempting to prepare meat al pastor in her kitchen, inspired by a documentary about tacos—when a friend texted and asked if she and her kids could stop over. “Sure,” Nosrat told her. “I’m just over here ruining some pork.”

At this time, Nosrat said, she was searching for a way to handle the fame that “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” had brought, and the concomitant feelings of guilt and self-doubt. Perhaps more important, she had tapered off the antidepressants she’d taken for years, in order to try psychedelic therapy—which didn’t work. The six pounds of pork she had ruined seemed like a synecdoche for her whole life, which, apparently, she had also ruined. When her friend arrived and saw her predicament, she suggested that Nosrat bring the pork to her house a few nights later; they’d figure out what to do with it together. Nosrat grasped at the invitation like a lifeline. That get-together evolved, over time, into Monday dinner, a now weekly ritual with a group of ten or so that, Nosrat told me, has become “the heart of everything for me.”

It’s also at the heart of the book Nosrat has finally produced: “Good Things,” part cookbook, part self-portrait, which does indeed contain recipes, along with advice, confessions, and stories about her dog. It begins with an acknowledgment that Nosrat worries she’s betrayed her readers and herself by assembling “a book of recipes after writing ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,’ which is a veritable manifesto designed to free cooks from relying on them.” But, as the introduction suggests, “Good Things” represents a dramatic rethinking of what Nosrat wants out of life in general. She’s still not quite sure where that leads. It might take her away from food entirely.

Nosrat was born in San Diego, the child of Iranian immigrants who’d arrived in the U.S. just a few years prior. When she was eighteen months old, her three-year-old sister, Sammar, died of brain cancer; the tragedy, Nosrat told me, contributed to her spending her own life as “a crazy achievement machine,” in an attempt to please her mother and make up for the absence. She struggled to fit in socially—a consequence, she’s said, of growing up “as a brown kid in a super-white world”—but excelled academically. She was studying at U.C. Berkeley when, bewitched by a meal at Alice Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, she got a job there bussing tables and eventually talked her way into a culinary internship. Or, as Nosrat jokes, “I went from my incredibly demanding, impossible-to-please mother’s house into another incredibly demanding, impossible-to-please mother’s house.” She learned in Waters’s kitchen, then left the nest, serving stints as a sous-chef elsewhere, taking catering gigs, and beginning to teach others. Her first thirty-odd years, she said, trained her to be a perfectionist. “There’s a lot I appreciate in that,” she said. “I also constantly use it as a cudgel to, like, hate myself and be mean to myself.”

Now forty-five, Nosrat sees in her life “a funny arc, of becoming a cook in this world-class kitchen, and then having to unlearn that in order to survive as a human in the world.” The tension is detectable in her work. “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” is a welcoming cookbook in many ways—Nosrat is an engaging, funny writer, her lessons for the amateur chef peppered with jokey asides and whimsical illustrations—but it is rigorous, even stern. For all its flexibility, it still insists upon a version of the high standards that its author learned at the feet of those demanding mothers. Do not be satisfied with what some recipe might lead you to prepare for dinner on a Tuesday night, the book says. Taste! Experiment! Demand better! Nosrat even gently chides the dabbler who hasn’t plowed through the whole text: “This book is really about the journey, not the destination. So maybe stop trying to skip ahead in life, and head back to the beginning. XO.”

In person, Nosrat seems more relaxed. She’s tall, with springy, dark brown curls that frame her expressive face. The day I visited, she wore a black crewneck and jeans; she led me to her cluttered living room, where we settled on a couch. When I asked a question, she would often offer an immediate, off-the-cuff answer, then double back and reconsider, as one might when prompted by a therapist. At one point, she lay down on the floor, her bare feet pointed toward the ceiling, as I took notes on the couch above her.

I could smell chicken and rice from the nearby kitchen, but, for once, Nosrat wasn’t cooking. She had returned from Italy the day before, and was feeling harried as the book tour for “Good Things” loomed, so she’d asked her assistant, Amalia Mariño, to make our lunch. I felt a churlish disappointment not to be served something Nosrat herself had prepared, but reminded myself that she didn’t owe me anything other than her attention.

“Good Things,” in fact, makes a point of urging readers not to make gatherings more ornate than they need to be—to go easy on yourself, and offer guests something uncomplicated that you can throw together in a few minutes. These days, Nosrat writes, “I spend less energy trying to do everything for everyone, and focus on spending quality time outside the kitchen with the people I love.” In a way, I reasoned, a lunch made by one’s assistant is the most uncomplicated lunch one can serve.

The Monday dinners, Nosrat told me, have helped her become a little less precious about food. Many of the other participants have small children, who have a way of putting a damper on culinary ambitions. “It’s always good, in that we have a nice dinner together,” she said, “but sometimes it’s just-fine food. It’s not the best anything.” The night before, Nosrat had thrown together some pasta with canned tuna that she’d schlepped back from Italy; sometimes the group just assembles a meal from whatever’s around, or orders pizza. Even when she was at her lowest, her friends would welcome her, and feed her. Nosrat said, “That was the first time in my life that I showed up at a place empty-handed and still I felt cared for, I had something to be part of.” Coming to terms with a just-fine dinner went hand in hand with realizing that “friendship isn’t about proving to someone you deserve to be there.”

As we ate, I confessed my ambivalence about the new book’s more exacting predecessor. I loved “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” but I also felt guilty each time I used it like a cookbook: that is, each time I flipped through, chose a recipe, and returned it to the shelf. When she wrote it, Nosrat acknowledged, she didn’t really trust the recipe as a form. What’s more, she said, “before ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,’ I’d probably written fewer than twenty.” If her cooking students asked her, at the end of her forty-hour class, for a recipe list, she viewed it as a failure—on her part and on theirs. “A large part of my distaste was that, by definition, a recipe is a constraint,” she said. She found it frustrating to limit the scope of instruction to a single dish, rather than connecting that dish to all the other techniques and cuisines it could also teach you. “Once you know one thing, you know fifty things,” she said. Writing an individual recipe broke her heart, because “what I’m always hoping for is to give you the keys to the kingdom.”

“But I don’t always want the keys to the kingdom,” I said. Often, I just wanted to try something new, and then serve it to my family.

“I know,” Nosrat said, sighing. “I think I’ve grown up a lot.” Prior to “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” her primary feeling about her own recipes was one of disappointment at all she’d had to leave out. In the wake of the book’s success, and the show’s, people began approaching her out in the world to tell her about their experiences with her work. They almost always wanted to tell her about a specific recipe they’d cooked—“I made the big lasagna!,” “I made the buttermilk chicken!”—and what it meant to them. Rarely, she added, did home cooks rush up to tell her, “I really loved the way you made me think more broadly about butternut squash, and so I innovated whatever whatever.”

What I love about a good recipe, I told her, is that in following the author’s instructions—maybe diverging from the prescribed steps, maybe adhering to them exactly—I’m not only thinking alongside the writer but making something alongside her, which I then get to eat. “What a cool thing,” she said, nodding. “People engage with the thing that I made, and it leads to them having a good feeling.”

As Nosrat herself started to feel better—after she went back on antidepressants, which, she said, “I’m never going off again”—she searched for a way to make a book of recipes that still felt like her. Looking up the etymology of “recipe,” she learned that its roots are in the Latin verb recipiō, to receive. “It’s the imperative form,” she said. “It’s, like, ‘Here, take this.’ ” What if, she thought, instead of thinking of recipes as imperfect tools, or as a failure of her method, she thought of them as gifts?

The recipes in “Good Things” are, for the most part, much simpler than the ones in “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” Some of them are barely recipes at all; sometimes Nosrat abandons the form entirely. (Suggesting readers fry a slice of bread in olive oil becomes absurd if you begin, “One slice bread. Two tablespoons olive oil.”) The dishes are, she told me, the kinds of uncomplicated food that she cooks for herself, or brings to Monday dinner. I’ve cooked a dozen of them, and my family has loved them.

The book is discursive where “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” was argumentative, ramshackle where the first was intricately constructed. It reflects the realization that someone might love Nosrat for being herself, not for her expertise. “Here,” she said. “I’m going to offer you this thing that is not that fancy, not that groundbreaking or innovative. It’s just something that means something to me.” She held out her open hand to me across the table. “It’s up to you. You can do with it as you will.”

After lunch, we took Nosrat’s dog, Fava, for a walk. Fava snuffled and dawdled and took her own sweet time up the sidewalk. When the UPS guy drove up, she ambled over to his truck; he gave her a treat. On her recent trip to Italy, Nosrat told me, she’d taken her girlfriend, Ebony Haight, to a five-day tomato-paste workshop at the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school. “Ebony was having realization after realization,” Nosrat said, about the perils of dating a chef, who might, in lieu of a normal vacation, bring you to a farm in Sicily to literally watch tomatoes dry.

Seeing the workshop through Haight’s eyes seemed to clarify something for Nosrat about her own relationship to the foodie-industrial complex. “Food is this thing we have to eat to survive,” she said. “But it’s also this thing we fetishize, so that people will pay thousands of dollars to cross the world to eat a meal, or go to a tomato-paste workshop. And I think I’m not interested in any of that anymore.”

When “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” was published, the British chef Yotam Ottolenghi told Nosrat what comes next for a chef on the cusp of success. “He was, like, ‘O.K., now it’s time for you to put on your big-girl pants.’ ” Ottolenghi runs restaurants, operates a test kitchen, and sells products through mail order. Nosrat recalls thinking, “I totally have to do that.” Then, she said, considering what it would take to manage an entire team of people, as Ottolenghi does, “I just kind of melted.”

But what kind of public chef did she want to be? “I didn’t want my face on pots and pans at Target,” she said. Though she enjoyed doing the Netflix show—which sent her around the world to delve into the uses of salt, fat, acid, and heat—she didn’t want to be a “standing-in-front-of-a-stove” TV chef. And, she added, “I definitely did not want to have restaurants. That was brutal, and destroyed me.”

She still loves food as a “storytelling device,” she said, and as a way to connect to one’s roots. But mostly she’s interested in it as the reason she gets together with her friends every week. “I don’t really care about all of the other stuff,” she told me. “And I feel like if I were to try and make a life and career out of it, I would really have to care.”

That would sure limit her future potential as a food personality, I observed. She didn’t disagree. But she admitted that she might waver over the coming year. “I’m about to be offered many shiny objects and opportunities, and I’m not that good at saying no,” she said. “I lose my, like, internal compass pretty easily.” Recently, a hotel group had approached her and asked her to consult on their restaurant menus. There was the money, of course: no small thing for someone who spent her twenties saying yes to every catering job she was offered, just to make rent. Also, she thought, if she did this consulting she’d always be able to stay in their fancy hotels, maybe for free.

In the end, though, she said no. I suggested that the ritual that changed the way she thought about herself could also be a useful gauge for who she might be in the future. Does the thing you’re being offered, the thing you might do, the thing you might make, feel wonderful enough to miss Monday dinner for? “That is true,” she said. Her life is different than it was when the first book came out. “I have Fava now.” She pointed at Fava, who was rolling in something disgusting. “I’ve got home, and my neighbors, and I’m part of a little community. I have Ebony. And I think I have a deeper knowledge of who I am. Maybe. A little bit.” ♦

How many of your children saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk on their phones? Did they seek it out, or did it just roll in unannounced on their feeds? If they had never heard of Kirk before they watched his gruesome murder, how did they make sense of what they saw? Did the horrific image—I won’t describe it, because you have probably already seen it—sear itself into their memories?

I ask because I have two young children and spend most of my time around other parents. In the days after the videos of Kirk’s death spread across social media, I realized that most children with phones, as far as I could tell, had viewed at least one unedited version. This was likely not the first disturbing video these children had encountered, of course, nor the first act of political violence that had appeared on their feeds. These same children, who are mostly between the ages of eleven and eighteen, saw the President’s bleeding ear and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of images of unfathomable trauma in Gaza. How will these already infamous scenes fall into order in their minds and coalesce into something resembling history?

Widely dispersed photos and video—the stuff we all see—are the closest thing we have to a collective, democratized history, but the connections between memories and their associated images wear thin and become increasingly unreliable. For baby boomers, those images include people standing and pointing in the direction of gunshots at a motel in Memphis, Kennedy’s exploding head, the documentary footage of crowds at Woodstock, the girl in the picture in Vietnam, the bodies at Jonestown, and so forth. As boomers have aged, those images have become a bit unmoored from their place in time, and more evocative of a feeling of rebellion and change, or whatever. I’m sure many members of that generation would tell you that they watched Kennedy get shot live on television, and would describe the terrible movement of his head, without realizing that what they were describing was the Zapruder film, which first aired to the public in 1975, more than a decade after Kennedy’s motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza. Maybe they will also tell you that they saw the photos of the My Lai massacre—and they very well may have, but perhaps the image they are recalling is that of the naked girl running from a napalm attack in Trảng Bàng.

My generation—I am forty-five years old—seemingly grew up with far fewer public images of violence. One of the texts I’ve grappled with and referenced before in my column is Jean Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” which argues that Operation Desert Storm was a conflict designed specifically for a new media landscape in which most people would be following the war on cable news. Americans watched Patriot missiles light up the night sky, but, in contrast to those watching TV during the war in Vietnam, we did not see casualties, or much destruction, nor did we tune in every night to hear a litany of the names of dead servicemen. Until 9/11, the violence that we did see on TV was mostly poor quality and from a distance: the shaky shots of the burning Branch Davidian compound, in Waco; the remains of the federal building in Oklahoma City. (One notable exception was the images of starving children during the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia, which inspired a worldwide effort marked by the release of the charity single “We Are the World.”)

So here’s a series of questions:

If exposure to images of violence changes a generation of children, how are boomers different from my generation—and how will my own children, who will be exposed to far more evidence of political violence than I have been, be different from me?

Is the effect of seeing carefully selected images of violence through the evening news or newspapers different from that caused by the chaos of violent images children see today through their phones?

If we agree that history is formed through these images, what does history look like when there are thousands of different choices, camera angles, interpretations, and even fakes? How would we understand the massacre at Kent State if it happened today? What would it look like? What happens when, rather than all of us seeing an image of a young woman in the throes of shock and mourning kneeling over a dead body, we see hundreds of cellphone videos that capture the terror as it unfolds in real time?

I don’t have any satisfying answers to these questions, nor do I have a particularly strong opinion on whether children should see these scenes or not. There have been years of studies on the effects that violence on television and in video games has on young minds, and some authors have suggested that they desensitize children and might even lead to copycat acts. I have always been a bit skeptical of these claims, and particularly of the way that they are invoked during that emotional period after a tragedy has taken place, when people are looking around for someone or something to blame. And, of course, such studies do not fully explain why some kids can watch gore or play violent video games without any problems, and other kids allegedly turn into killers because of them.

In the past, panic over violence in various forms of media—hip-hop, video games, movies—has largely concerned works of fiction. The worry wasn’t that the real world was as violent as Grand Theft Auto and that children should be protected from the truth, but rather that Grand Theft Auto would be re-created in the real world. Today, children will see acts of actual violence that are indistinguishable from what they might see in movies or video games. Both will take place on the same tiny screens; oftentimes, they will appear back-to-back. Thanks to the democratization of content creation and the incursion of A.I. tools, there will be an untold volume of gore that’s well beyond the regulations and ratings systems that govern Hollywood and the gaming industry. What happens to these scenes of real political violence when they get sunk into a sea of slop? How fully might those lines blur?

For the past two decades, some of the work of figuring out what kids should and shouldn’t watch has been relegated to Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides in-depth ratings for video games, movies, and television shows, with the goal of putting “kids’ safety and well-being first in the digital era.” At its inception, back in the early two-thousands, the group mostly focussed on violent video games and movies, but it has pivoted in recent years toward addressing the fire hose of content, much of it violent and real, that has taken over children’s screens. Jill Murphy, the organization’s chief content officer, told me that, at young ages, children probably do not have the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not, but, as they grow older and can make those distinctions, footage of real violence tends to “have a stronger and a much more harmful developmental impact” on children, “because it feels so immediate and it feels so personal, and they know that it’s true, and can be true, and can apply potentially to their own personal lives.” She and her organization understand that it’s difficult for parents to police everything their children see on their screens. You can make sure your kid does not have a phone, but once they go to school one of their friends will, and they will be sharing a potentially traumatizing video with anyone who will watch. (Murphy’s own daughter, for example, saw the footage of Kirk’s assassination because a kid who sat next to her in class was watching it.) As a result, Common Sense Media argues that there should be robust age-verification regulations put on social-media companies, to make sure that children are not being inundated with lurid content at all hours of the day.

Still, even if we assume that watching violence on a screen does produce a host of bad psychological effects, we should also ask if there’s a cost to not witnessing violence when it happens, and to sanitizing an unstable and precarious world. It seems like most fifteen-year-olds in America today have seen decapitated babies and starving children in Gaza. They have seen the bloody aftermath of a music festival held on October 7th. Before that, they watched George Floyd slowly lose consciousness and die with a police officer’s knee on his neck. They saw a police precinct in Minneapolis set ablaze in response. And now they have seen an assassination from a few hundred feet away, at several different angles. Their parents, at their age, could not have imagined this vocabulary of violence or this grisly list of visual references.

I asked Murphy if she thought that restricting real-world footage might dull the reality of violence and risk re-creating, in a way, the obliviously jingoistic terms of Desert Storm. “We as adults have a responsibility to our children to create an environment where they can move through challenges at a pace that feels manageable,” she replied. All children, she added, would have to deal with the realities of a violent world at some point, but there was something excessive and chaotic about the full access children now have to every act of political violence and bombing that is taking place around the world.

I certainly agree that there is some age at which children should be protected from seeing these things, but I don’t know what that age is. My daughter is eight years old, and I don’t think she has seen the video of Kirk’s death—although, who can really be sure these days? While driving her around this past week, I have felt a powerful urge to preserve this innocence, despite understanding the futility and even the sentimentality of such silly nostalgia for my own cloistered childhood. As long as the majority of kids above the age of twelve have internet access and a screen in their pockets, they’re going to watch far more snuff films than anyone else in the history of the world. And, as long as those videos are posted within seconds of the act, there will probably be no meaningful way to stop them from being shared. These children, as a result, may have a much clearer idea of what happens when one of those missiles—which looked almost beautiful, white trails of smoke against a black sky—actually hits its target. Death and trauma of all types will not be as abstract for them as they were for us. Will our children resist violence more than we did? Or will they fall into the nihilism of those who have seen too much history happen in their lifetimes? ♦